Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

“My son,” Augustine spat at the monster. “You killed my son. You killed my brother.”

“We’re lucky it didn’t commit genocide on us,” Constantine said. “After the crimes we’ve committed against it.”

Augustine’s glare was animated by hatred, never leaving the monster. It was strange, Constantine mused, that so much of human emotion was personalized. To think wide was to dissipate all strength of feeling. But he knew his brother could accomplish the intellectual leap—after all, he had, even though the process had taken fifty years.

“Give us some time,” Constantine said to the hulking Aldred-avatar. “I have so much to explain to my brother.”

By morning the blizzard had subsided. Sirius was shining bright pink across the canyon, darkening its massive walls to a midnight black. Lighter rosy ringlight was washed away behind the most aggressive display of shifting colors the St. Libra aurora had ever produced. The vast rivers of ethereal light twirled and looped over the snow-clad roofs of the convoy vehicles, on occasion even reaching down into the canyon itself, a giant’s fingers stroking the jumbled white land.

Antrinell led what was left of the convoy personnel out into the clean, calm dawn. Angela followed him out, wishing she weren’t so tired. Maybe it was just the blues after having achieved so much, but she felt she should be in higher spirits.

There was too much sorrow to overcome, she decided. They’d lost so many people that the accord they’d come to with St. Libra didn’t settle well, not on the human psyche.

It had taken half of the night to open up the remaining warheads and remove the metavirus containers. One by one their contents had been vaporized under the steady gaze of the hulking Barclay-avatar. All of them knew that something altogether more massive, and possibly quite magical, was looking out at the process through the monster’s eyes. Understanding the abstract and acknowledging the fact were quite different things.

Nobody really trusted it. Not the monster who had slain so many of them. So the Barclay-avatar stood to one side while narrow-bladed axes were used to chisel the rock-hard bodies of Atyeo and Garrick from the wind-compacted ice that locked them fast against the frozen river. While Angela was taking her turn, on her knees, hammering rhythmically at the ground, she glanced over at the motionless figure standing in front of the overturned Tropic-1. Despite its solidified features, she could tell it was unmoved by the human ritual. Reverence to the dead was clearly not a part of it. But then, would it mourn every leaf that fell from its myriad trees, exhibit sorrow for every spore that didn’t germinate? Short individual lives were a forgotten history for it now.

When she’d had enough, she stood up and handed her ax to Ken Schmitt. It was so much easier to move without having to wear the armor, though she noticed not everyone had abandoned it. Paresh was one of them.

“They’re on their way,” the Barclay-avatar announced abruptly.

“Who are?” Tamisha asked.

“The Jupiter humans. They have arrived at Newcastle. Constantine has kept his word, and the gateway has been deactivated.”

“Just keeps getting better and better,” Antrinell said bitterly. “No way home even if we do ever get out of here.”

Rebka put her head close to Angela. “If a lightwave ship is here, it’ll be overhead in less than an hour.”

“What’s a lightwave ship?”

“UFO, basically.”

“Cool,” Angela said.

Whatever the avatar’s promise, Antrinell insisted they keep working. They refilled the bioil tanks of both biolabs. Atyeo and Garrick were finally freed from the ice, and wrapped in sleeping bags.

“Take a break for lunch,” Antrinell said when the bodies were put on Tropic-2’s sledge, next to Elston and the others. “When we get back out here we’ll launch a comm rocket. This weather’s as good as it’ll get.”

His voice was swamped by what sounded like a terrific airburst explosion. The canyon walls reverberated, kicking loose several micro avalanches along the rim. Ice groaned and cracked under Angela’s boots. A thin halo of snow puffed off the vehicles.

“What the hell?”

Everyone was cowering, glancing fearfully up at the shimmering curtains of moiré light that danced through the air above. Even the Barclay-avatar had flinched, Angela saw.

“Ya-hey!” Rebka shrieked. She was dancing about like a ten-year-old, waving her arms wide at the sky. “They’re here. Oh wow! Raul’s piloting.” She jumped up again, her arms still windmilling excitedly.

Angela stared in astonishment at the dark teardrop shape that was ripping through the aurora’s placid streamers along the canyon. Like all castaways devoid of hope, she found rescue, when it finally came, hard to believe.

The spaceship slowed and tipped up, presenting its broad base to the ground, then touched down fifty meters away. Tiny emerald sparks skipped along the malformed rings sticking out of its center, as if it were squeezing the aurora into concentrated droplets. Rebka grabbed Angela’s arm, tugging her along. “Come on, you’ve got to meet Raul.”

“Who’s Raul?”

“My brother. Well… he’ll probably deny it. To be honest, I was a bit of a pain growing up.” Her face, framed by the wrapped scarf and woolly hat, was so girlishly vibrant that Angela had to smile back. That happiness was like a force of nature.

A hatchway opened and two men stepped out, wearing the same protective oil-slick layer that Rebka’s metamolecule cloak could form. They’d left an oval open to show their faces. Rebka squealed and flung her arms around the taller, younger one.

“Mother, this is Raul.”

“Angela DeVoyal,” he said in trepidation. “ The Angela DeVoyal. Excuse me, but we’ve all been waiting a very long time to meet you.”

“Of course you have,” Angela told him, and burst out laughing at how ludicrous that statement was.

Nobody had much to take with them. Most didn’t even bother delving back into the vehicles to collect their personal kit bags. Angela was one who did. Her bag and the items she’d bought at the Birk-Unwin store were the only possessions she had in the universe, the first she’d owned in twenty years, each one paid for by the money earned in Holloway. Money didn’t come harder than that. Which made them important.

After she’d tugged the frost-covered bag out of Tropic-2, she switched the vehicle’s power cells off. They’d been on standby since last night. Given the high temperature they operated at, restarting them in subzero conditions would probably shatter them. Elston hadn’t wanted to risk that. The lights on the dashboard went out. For the first time in eighteen days she didn’t have the whiny buzz of machinery in her ears.

Eighteen days?

She found herself trembling. The convoy’s journey was too intense, too visceral to be a mere eighteen days. Even the joy of being reunited with Rebka could not compensate for the enormity of everything she’d endured.

Angela backed out of the Tropic, seeing the Barclay-avatar waiting on the frozen river as Ken, Sakur, and Tamisha carried Botin’s stretcher to the waiting spaceship. The non-human thing was as impassive as it ever was, standing perfectly still as fat strands of the aurora caressed it as though it communed with the lightstorm. In her mind she saw into the humanoid shell it wore, saw through it, saw how it could be the spirit living in the plants, a fabulously complex life force swathed around a planet as a corona clung to a star. Immense, immortal, the triumph of an evolution billions of years beyond anything terrestrial biology could aspire to. Rich with abilities that humans couldn’t even imagine for their gods. She was standing on it, amid it. Irrelevant, infinitesimal, her time fleeting.